Tell-Tale Signs of the Modern-Day Yuppie

Of all the family-newspaper-appropriate socioeconomic slurs, one that was ubiquitous in the 1980s and ’90s is slowly on its way out in this millennium: yuppie.

This moderately derogatory term for young urban professionals, or young upwardly mobile professionals (given more kick with the addendum of “scum”), is believed to have first appeared in print in a 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg, though he does not take credit for coining it. A Google Ngram search reveals that the word’s usage in books began ascending steeply in 1983 and reached its apex a decade later.

It’s no surprise that the yuppie flourished after the gloomy ’70s had yielded to easy money in the stock market (until 1987, at least) for postcollegiate brokers and boomers eager to invest after their youthful fling with the counterculture. Television and movies amply reflected the proliferating demographic. The yuppie apotheosis on the small screen was “Thirtysomething” and “Seinfeld”; in the multiplex, there were too many to mention, but “The Big Chill” and “When Harry Met Sally” would be a good start, and, on the darker side, Michael Douglas’s 1987 filmography (“Wall Street” and “Fatal Attraction”).

We have plenty of equivalents today, such as “This Is 40” (and nearly every other romantic comedy) and TV’s “Togetherness” and the recently departed “Parenthood” and “How I Met Your Mother” (and most other dramedies and sitcoms). Their organic-buying, gym-going, homeowning characters, however, aren’t tagged as yuppies as readily as those from the previous era were. It’s not because they aren’t from the narcissistic upper middle class; they certainly are. But they look different now.

The yuppie has shifted from standing on the prow of his yacht in an attitude of rapaciously aspirational entitlement to a defensive crouch of financial and existential insecurity. This instability has fragmented the yuppie’s previously coherent identity into a number of personae, each of which can trace its lineage to its ’80s paterfamilias.

Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves.

And that may be the starkest difference. Unbridled acquisitiveness was the central trait of the ’80s yuppie; the dread of losing one’s property and dropping down a tax bracket may define the contemporary one. Fiercely protecting one’s existing money seems less gauche than plotting ways to grab more, even if it’s just a circumstantial response. But we have fooled ourselves into thinking we aren’t as money-oriented as the ’80s yuppie by scapegoating a perennially convenient villain: bankers. Placing all the blame for the 2008 financial crisis on this easily scorned group allows us to overlook our own overreaching transactions.

If slicked-back, bespoke, Reaganite Wall Street was regarded as the economy’s savior after the ’70s, the correlation now, after George W. Bush, the financial crisis and years of the global war on terrorism, would be Barack Obama’s Silicon Valley, whose digital gold rush beckons creative young minds with bedhead under hoodies.

The tech sector and 21st-century entrepreneurship serve as another cover and proxy for yuppiedom. When the Venn diagram intersects, we revere their leaders almost like movie stars (indeed, they are often portrayed by them — in the case of Steve Jobs, twotimes in three years). In a 2014 survey of 15,000 millennials by the firm Collegefeed, 11 of the top 12 companies they most wanted to work for were tech outfits.

While there is certainly something more admirable, and typically less noxious, about those who innovate ideas and services than those who place bets and structure deals, let’s call it what it is. No matter how fervently techies and entrepreneurs claim they want to “change the world” (see any episode of “Shark Tank”), far fewer of them would be in the disruption game if the potential profits weren’t world-changing as well. The lovable millennial bumblers on “Silicon Valley” may be scruffy and genuinely passionate about coding, but their goal — making money and leveraging power — is quintessentially yuppie, even if their social skills aren’t.

As for millennials, they have inherited an economy too fragile, and student loans too insurmountable, to enable their full-fledged yuppification. But they still share their ancestors’ love for conspicuous consumption (Instagram pictures of meals, parties and vacations) and toys (in lieu of expensive cars, real estate and artwork, the sleekly technological and more affordable plunder of Apple products and apps).

Then there’s the yuppie’s extended family: all insatiable consumers, just of different products. We have the gentrifier (read: typically white person), who has moved into an “up and coming” (read: historically nonwhite) neighborhood now that it has a Whole Foods; the metrosexual (a term that’s already become obsolete because it applies to such a broad spectrum), who tends to his appearance as obsessively as does Patrick Bateman in “American Psycho”; the “bro,” who has transitioned from the frat house to the sports bar, and his pumpkin-latte-sipping girlfriend; the foodie; the SoulCyclist or CrossFitter; and so on, until, finally and most confusingly, the hipster, which no one will admit being.

The hipster may seem to be the antithesis of the yuppie in his professional complacency, in his disdain for or ironic appropriation of everything mainstream. Yet all but the most bohemian of hipsters still relish the trappings of late capitalism, when he can get his hands on them: the designer jeans and Chuck Taylors, the small-batch bourbon and maple-marinated tempeh, the borrowed HBO Go password and cracked-screen iPhone. (All things I indulge in myself, although I’m certainly not a — whoops.) He’s simply less ambitious about obtaining them and more circumspect about signaling his desire for consumer goods: a yuppie in slacker’s thrift-store clothing.

Perhaps the hipster’s rebellion from the yuppie’s careerism should be commended for its ingenuity. He has deduced how to work the minimal amount for maximal comforts. He’s seen that the yuppie lifestyle didn’t ultimately satisfy his (possibly divorced) boomer parents, has opted out of traditional adulthood and is cutting his losses now, because if the country is no longer ascendant, it probably means he can’t be, either.